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November 21-22, 2008,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
The third Futures of Entertainment (EoE) conference was held at MIT in late November 2008. As with the previous events, the two-day conference was sponsored by the Creative Culture Consortium (C3), a northeast US-based group of media scholars, practitioners, managers, and consultants anchored by Henry Jenkins of MIT. C3 aims to provide a working model of academia-industry collaboration, bringing together people who share a broad interest in developing media, and in "convergence culture": the evolving and expanding transmedia spaces of contemporary media where old categories and practices break down in favor of malleability, mobility, and increased user control and participation. Each FoE conference has functioned as a public forum on convergence culture, as scholars and industry professionals have discussed key aspects of contemporary media.
With convergence introduced as a theme at the first two conference on the heels of Jenkins's influential 2006 book, Convergence Culture, this year's event was more focused on the labor of convergence, i.e., how it is made to happen by people and groups across media and culture Jenkins's opening keynote set the tone in this regard, critiquing the blanket usage of the term "viral media" in journalism, industry, and the academy, which he believes inaccurately describes a diverse array of media practices. Instead, Jenkins argued, we should think of these media forms (e.g. , YouTube videos, Photoshopped images, audio mashups, etc.) as "spreadable media, " emphasizing the actions of media creators and sharers, rather than their passivity as suggested by the metaphor of a virus. The term "viral" suggests the old model of broadcasting where media use is regarded as the result of centralized coordination and users are mere receptacles for targeted content. "Spreadable," by contrast, frames media users as creative and collaborative agents, building media texts and communities outside corporate strategies of market control. Jenkins raised the example of the new Organization for Transformative Works (http: // www .transformativeworks.org/) as an important champion of such spreadability. Similariy, he likened spreadable media practices to Lewis Hyde's theories of gift economies, arguing that convergent media's very malleability and mobility have granted new registers of value to active media users. This linkage of spreadability and "gifting" was reinforced in Jenkins's discussion with networking theorist...